The fundemental problem with employer supplied health-care: There's a strong disincentive to employ the useful yet expensively ill.
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02:33:49 PM,
Thursday 23 June 2005
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Business idea: customizable flammable Faux-Flags for silly protesters.
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11:16:18 AM,
Thursday 23 June 2005
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Trader Joe's pound plus milk chocolate bar isn't half bad.
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(1)
02:14:25 PM,
Wednesday 22 June 2005
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Mortality is a theory, not a fact.
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(4)
09:28:03 AM,
Wednesday 22 June 2005
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Erika is playing FFX. This is her first foray into non-arcade games since her fateful 24 hour session of Alpha Centauri, her only encounter with Civ type games, which functioned as some sort of aversion therapy. Fascinatingly, she named herself Cloud in FFX. As far as I know, she has never even seen FFVII. She had no idea that Cloud wasn't simply a random name she thought up.
Also, I can recommend Suikoden III. It lacks the bathos of a Final Fantasy, but compared to anything else, the characters and plot are engaging enough, the game and the plot are fairly well joined, and along with the standard lizardmen there's a town of ducks. How did we get to a point where giant lizardmen are simply ordinary?
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(2)
08:37:49 PM,
Tuesday 21 June 2005
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Found clams, for the first time in my life. Two of them. Little holes in the sand, we dug, and clams, with tongues and everything. Clearly alive, because they respond when poked, but utterly alien. Beaches grow clams. Matter rearranges itself into clams. One boggles.
Further research shows these were in fact hen (or sea, or surf) clams.
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(7)
08:06:03 PM,
Sunday 19 June 2005
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Kinsley on the Downing Street Memo:
"(...) in the end I don't buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the left's revival. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it. It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy."
I find this something of a relief. I was worried that I was missing something. We know that we failed to prevent weapons of mass destruction proliforating, either becuase there weren't any, or they proliforated before we got there. We know that the Colin Powell UN presentation was based on bad data. Why is this memo suddenly exciting? Who will it convince of our incompetence and lack of candor, who isn't already convinced? But as part of a constant drumbeat, of the sort generated around Whitewater, it makes sense.
One thing I've discovered recently is that local politics is actually nastier and more vicious than national politics. I'm not sure what to make of this.
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(3)
02:39:18 PM,
Thursday 16 June 2005
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I love it. Why are we launching the shuttle?
"The gear includes (...) test stands for spacewalking astronauts to practise shuttle heat-shield repair techniques, which Nasa, with its new external fuel tank, hopes never to have to use."
We send people into space in the shuttle to deliver equipment so we can practice fixing the shuttle. The fragile nature of the shuttle provides a whole new mission, both for itself and the ISS; setting up an orbiting shuttle repair shop.
I need to get a job a very long way away from government.
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02:24:10 PM,
Thursday 16 June 2005
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What is the point of having a cushy office job if the air conditioning breaks?
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12:03:47 PM,
Monday 13 June 2005
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Howl's Moving Castle was... vivid. About vanity, ambition, war and growing old. Perhaps the least adorable movie he's ever made, which isn't entirely a bad thing. The dog and the turnip are both ugly, that feels important. It's still going around in my head. For Boston people, every other showing at the Kendall Square Cinema is subtitled. It goes without saying, of course, that you should all see it, unless you have a particularly low tolerence for the obtuse. Miyazaki's primary trick is emotionally effecting incomprehensability, that feels like it all hangs together on some unseen level, but never gives itself away, is never crass enough to be symbolic or openly allegorical. It's quite a trick, and lets him do things that a clear film could never do, but it does mean all his movies move strangely, are misty and unsettling. Like the castle, I suppose.
If any of you see if and want to discuss, send me an email. I don't want to dissect it here. Films, like so many things, don't work as well after they've been chopped into pieces and prodded with crude instruments.
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08:13:48 PM,
Sunday 12 June 2005
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There is a Sith lord in American politics. Who do you suspect?
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(2)
07:52:15 PM,
Sunday 12 June 2005
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So the trees in front of the building that took forever to get their leaves are black locust. The ones in front of Alewife along the sidewalk are litteleaf linden, or perhaps some other linden.
Tree questionaires need to be more flexible, and include a I have no idea response; they should gather all the data they can, and then give you a list.
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01:14:44 PM,
Friday 10 June 2005
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site & script courtesy of Moss
